Every play starts with some dreaming. n And, in the case of La Jolla Playhouse’s “The Tall Girls,” some dribbling. n Inside a Playhouse rehearsal space — which will double as the performance venue for Meg Miroshnik’s play starting Thursday — five actors were sprinting and sweating through basketball drills one recent morning. n “The Tall Girls” is about a 1930s female hoops team, so the shooting and passing skills the performers were polishing will be integral to some scenes.

A lot of what they’ve been learning — under the tutelage of a coach from Palomar College — is new to the actors. But then, the unfamiliar, the unexpected and the decidedly untried are all at the heart of the “DNA New Work Series,” the theater’s festival of plays-in-development.

“The Tall Girls” launches the inaugural “DNA” fest, which unfolds over the course of several weeks this month and next.

Also on the series slate: “Chasing the Song,” a gestating musical from the creative team behind the Tony Award-winning “Memphis” (whose Broadway production launched at the Playhouse): “Brahman/i, A One-Hijra Stand-Up Comedy Show,” a solo workshop piece by Aditi Brennan Kapil that riffs on matters of gender, history and mythology; and one-day readings of “Being Henrietta” by Monique Gaffney, “Orange Julius” by Basil Kreimendahl, and “The Consultant” by Heidi Schreck, plus three other plays to be named.

“This is really about the writing,” says Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley of the idea behind the series, which will focus on works that are getting their first, bare-bones exposure to audiences.

That differentiates “DNA” from the existing “Page to Stage” workshop program, composed of shows that are further along the developmental road (and receive more fleshed-out productions).

The “DNA” series, Ashley adds, is also about giving audiences a window into the fluid, fascinating, sometimes messy business of committing a new act of theater.

“I think there’s so much desire to see how the art is made,” as Ashley puts it. “And so much desire to connect with the artists.”

Risky behavior

Ashley, who directed “Memphis,” is doing the same for “Chasing the Song.” He’s again working with writer-lyricist Joe DiPietro and composer-lyricist David Bryan (of the band Bon Jovi), who shared the best-score Tony for “Memphis” in 2010. (The show also was named best musical.)

While “Memphis” centered on the birth of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, “Chasing the Song” jumps ahead to the ’60s. It’s set in the Brill Building, New York’s crucible of pop songwriting, in the days before the Beatles shook up the music scene.

The piece focuses in part on a woman who runs a struggling music-publishing business in the building, and on her discovery of a promising young composer. But DiPietro, who has worked with Ashley on numerous shows over the years, wanted to experiment with a vignette-minded approach to storytelling, in the manner of the late film director Robert Altman (“Nashville,” “A Prairie Home Companion”).

DiPietro says the creative team also wanted to incorporate songs and song fragments into the piece in unconventional ways, echoing how music spilled out of offices and studios all over the Brill Building.

The “DNA” series, he says, offered just the right kind of “lab” for such experimentation.

“It’s the perfect opportunity to take chances,” DiPietro says. “That’s the best thing about it. Because no one’s pressuring you to sell tickets. Nobody’s writing about it in the newspaper the next day.” (The Playhouse is requesting that, as works in progress, the “DNA” productions not be reviewed.)

When such pressures are present, “it’s easy to always make the middle-of-the road choice,” DiPietro adds. But here, “it’s ‘No, let’s be a little ragged with this.’ ”

No slam-dunks required

That give-it-a-whirl ethos is also a good fit for her play, says Miroshnik, a Yale Drama grad and rising playwright whose play “The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls” was a finalist for the prestigious Blackburn Prize in 2012.

“You can’t fake making a basket,” notes Miroshnik of the “The Tall Girls” and its hoops-shooting scenes. “It either goes in or it doesn’t. So that’s part of the excitement for the audience.”

The play, Miroshnik says, was inspired by a photo of her grandfather taken in the early 1930s, during his brief and mysterious career as a high-school girls basketball coach in Glyndon, Minn.

One theme explored in “The Tall Girls,” which was previously developed at the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, is the misimpression that girls sports were dismissed or frowned upon everywhere in the years before Title IX. (That was the 1972 law that helped put female student-athletes on an equal footing with males.)

In fact, in farm towns such as Glyndon (which serves as a model for the play’s fictional community), “there was nothing unusual about girls being athletic and physical,” Miroshnik says.

There is something unusual about “The Tall Girls” landing a spot in the Playhouse fest, though.

“It fell out of the sky,” Miroshnik says of the opportunity. “It’s so rare you get a call from a theater that you have no relationship with.”

As far as what the “DNA” setup means for her play, “I think the big thing is this: It’s so much longer than the average development process,” says Miroshnik.

“The Tall Girls” has received more than three weeks of workshopping and rehearsals; it then gets an additional week-plus to respond to audience reactions and feedback.

“I’ve never had that before,” Miroshnik says with a smile. “So it’s exciting.”